Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Cuyahoga County Saving Pennies at the Pump With New Stickers

As you probably know by now, Cuyahoga County is replacing its ubiquitous Frank Russo Weights & Measures stickers across Northeast Ohio. Bearing the smiling mug of the disgraced Auditor, the previous stickers — plastered on gas pumps and registers every year — served as constant county-financed campaigning for Russo as well as a tidy timeline of the auditor’s ever-growing steakhouse-bribe-fed jowls.

The new stickers are way simpler: no pictures, just the basic info and County Exec Ed FitzGerald’s name. Even better: They feature a handy punch-hole system listing four years, meaning the county won’t need new ones until 2015.

According to FitzGerald spokesman John Kohlstrand, the county paid 13 cents per sticker in 2010, $4,136 in all for 30,200 units. The 2011-2014 versions cost just 3 cents each, totaling $2,167 for 100,000 stickers.

A couple reasons for this: the county chose one color instead of the previous two-color design, which was cheaper. Not having a photo also trimmed the cost, though we hear initial designs did in fact feature an old snapshot of County Executive FitzGerald dressed as Batman for Halloween in 1974. Those rumors, incidentally, could not be confirmed.